When I grow up, I want to be one of two things.  I either want to be CMO for a major multi-national corporation, or I want to be a rock star (though the fact that I am an average guitarist at best is irrelevant).

Many have dedicated themselves to the pursuit of the latter.  Most will fail.

In the good ‘ol days of the music business, getting your song played wasn’t all that complicated.  DJs and studio producers were easily accessible; you didn’t even have to look pretty to become a huge star.  In the late 1950s, it seemed as though all you needed to was create a song with a fast beat, and you had a hit on your hands.

Elvis Presley was discovered after doing a cheap studio recording of “My Happiness” that included his voice and his guitar, nothing else.  Buddy Holly played local clubs and talent competitions until he opened for Bill Haley and the Comets, upon which he was offered a sweet record contract.  Little Richard made it big thanks to an impromptu rendition of “Tutti Frutti” at a local recording studio.

Today, it takes the right connections to make it in the music industry … or it takes creativity.

Realistically, few of you know ‘the right people.’  And in order to get noticed and actually sell your music in this vast pool of artists trying to hit it big, you’ve got to do something notably different from everyone else.

OK Go, a geek-rock group from Chicago, perfectly reflect the kind of creativity one needs in the music business.  Veering far from the norm, the band went relatively unnoticed until it released the video for its first official single, “A Million Ways,” in 2005.  But it didn’t release it via the typical music video avenues.  Instead, they let it loose on YouTube, where it became a viral phenomenon.  In 2006, OK Go created a video for the single “Here It Goes Again,” shot in one take as the members of the band performed synchronized moves on four treadmills.  Insane, no?  But it worked, and OK Go walked away with a Grammy and the number two album on iTunes.

Laura Warshauer, an acquaintance of mine from university, has been playing guitar and singing for ages on the road to musical success.  Now signed to Island Records (the same label that deals with Fall Out Boy, Bon Jovi, and Melissa Etheridge), Laura is promoting her new album the grassroots way: by wandering around New York City on foot with her guitar, as seen below.  The success of this has yet to be seen, as the campaign has just begun, but talk about getting yourself noticed!

The music industry has so many people trying to get into it that it’s virtually impossible for someone taking the ’safe’ and ‘typical’ path to break through the walls if you aren’t friends with those already entrenched in the business.  But by marketing yourself in a unique and creative way, chances are you’ll get people talking.  And that’s the first step to greatness.  Rock on.

• 100 Social Media Resources for Musicians
• No Regrets About Good Music Promotion

A lot of discussion has been going on recently about Best Buy’s and Pepsi’s decisions to try out a new ‘look.’  Whether or not the failing economy has anything to do with it, the fact of the matter is that it seems that both companies are simply missing the point completely.

Yes, a logo design change is necessary sometimes.  My company went through the same thing last year, when our original logo was deemed ‘amateur’ and we realized the difficulties in scaling the image in different environments because it was simply too detailed (and don’t even get me started on how it looked on polo shirts).  Our new logo is much simpler, more linear, and cleaner, and it fit in well with the repositioning of our brand on the marketplace.

But that’s just it.  The logo redesign was but a minor part of the overall brand overhaul.  The latter in itself is a difficult task to achieve, and a dangerous one at that, but that’s not the point of this post.  I’m trying here to reaffirm the notion, so often debated by marketing experts, that changing one’s logo rarely impacts a brand and thus rarely helps with market share.

Pepsi has redesigned its logo many times over the years, certainly many more times than Coca-Cola, its primary competitor.  Why?  According to Beverage Digest, Chief Marketing Officer Dave Burwick reportedly said, “If we don’t change quickly, we run the risk of being a footnote to history.” Hold the phone – a chief marketing officer of a major multinational corporation said that?  And yet Pepsi’s market share has dramatically fallen over the years.  Perhaps it would behoove to follow marketing guru Seth Godin’s advice:

Take the time and money and effort you’d put into an expensive logo and put them into creating a product and experience and story that people remember instead.

Seth has it right: brand reputation is what makes a company money, not a snazzy logo.  Especially when you change the apparent name of one of your products to MtnDew, which, by the way, just looks idiotic anyway.  Given how many times Pepsi has changed its logo (and undoubtedly spent thousands on rebranding – physically – their products), and how Coca-Cola continues to dominate the marketplace without straying much from its original design, something about Pepsi’s logic just isn’t clicking.

By focusing on the consumer experience, your brand improves its reputation and economic status.  With that comes a warm fuzzy when a pleased consumer sees your logo.

Best Buy is taking the same route as Pepsi.  First of all, it is removing what is a very memorable graphic element to create a more mature look.  Gone are the big bold capital letters, gone is the solid yellow price tag.  In its place are some thin, rounded letters with capitals in the proper places.  They’re testing it out at the Mall of America right now.

But what’s been happening to Best Buy’s brand?  I’m assuming sales have dropped since the advent of online shopping; one can find items, often cheaper, in many more places, from Amazon to Craigslist to eBay.  And a veritable army of angry customers has formed due to Best Buy’s careless attitude about customer service.  IHateBestBuy.com has a thriving community of folks who aren’t hesitating to share their stories about purchases gone horribly awry; in February, the company was sued for $54 million dollars after it lost a customer’s laptop … and didn’t do anything about it.  To be honest, I’m not completely content with Best Buy at the moment either after I ordered an item online for pickup, only to be told when I went to pick it up (after receiving an email from Best Buy that my item was ready) that, oops, the item wasn’t actually there, and that I could cancel the order if I wanted to.  Yes, apparently that was my only option.  Thanks, guys.  Real helpful.

Solid products, excellent customer service, and a dedication to success will get you the green.  Lacking all of those but having a snazzy logo won’t.  Your company’s story is what makes the logo work, not the other way around.  And it does bother me when I see marketers change their company’s logo on a dime because it seems like a ‘quick fix’ for their problems.

• Your Brand Is Not Your Logo
  
• Chronic Logo Redesign vs Preserving Brand Integrity
• Best Buy New Logo Redesign

I opened the new issue of Wired today to an article, the title of which caught my attention immediately:

Kill Your Blog

The author, Paul Boutin, seems to be under the impression that blogs are, well, so 2004.  Now, apparently, “the blogosphere, once a freshwater oasis of folksy self-expression and clever thought, has been flooded by a tsunami of paid bilge.”

One could see this as true.  He references Technorati’s list of the top 100 blogs, all of which are corporate and/or professional blogs making a tidy yearly sum from advertising.  The era of personal, one-writer blogs may appear to have been pushed aside in favor of blogs that have multi-person staffs working twenty-four hours a day to deliver the most valuable content to their readers.

But to be completely honest, I’m not convinced.  I rarely visit the sites that have 5+ posts per day.  Why?  For one thing, I just don’t have the time to keep up with all of it.  Who with a full-time job and a personal life does?  Additionally, the information provided seems less valuable to me than that in single-person shops.  Some of the biggest blogs in the world spit out content constantly, making them, essentially, online newspapers.  I can set up Google alerts for the headlines on any particular topic without having to trudge through paragraphs of news.  No, I find much more value in poignant, thought-out posts from individuals who a) know and honor their blog’s focus and b) take the time to research, ponder, and analyze what they are about to present to the world.

For me, as a marketeer and young professional, this is why luminaries such as Chris Brogan, Seth Godin, and Penelope Trunk keep me coming back.  They don’t spew out superficial content, but rather provide information combined with references and anecdotes … the kind of juicy stuff you don’t get with these money-grabbing assembly lines.

I do not think anyone should go out right now and disband his or her blog.  Ignore your Technorati rank for a second and look inside of your community.  Do you have “regulars,” or people who continue to return to your site?  Are many people subscribed to you via RSS or email?  Is your comments section a haven for discussion, arguments, and debate?  My goal would be to answer all of those questions with a yes. This is the value for me as a blogger.  My aspirations as a blogger – and I realize I’m very, very early in the game here with this particular blog – is not to earn $75,000 per year because of some well-placed advertising.  I’m happy knowing that I give people something to think about, whether they agree with it or not.

Twitter is heralded in the Wired article as being “to 2008 what the blogosphere was to 2004.”  One cannot deny its influence on the Internet and, specifically, the Web 2.0 world as we know it.  From Barack Obama to Britney Spears to Padmasree Warrior, CTO of Cisco, ‘tweeting’ has become a great means of communicating with particular communities because it’s so fast.  It takes a fraction of the time to write a thought that is 140 characters versus putting together four or five paragraphs for a blog post.  I love Twitter.  I think it’s a brilliant tool to connect with one’s community as well as to follow others who provide you with ideas that you find useful.

But it won’t stop me from reading blogs, and I don’t think it will render blogs obsolete.  As much as people say that information-gathering needs to be quicker and briefer to compliment the fast-past life in which we all live, someone will always find a need to go a little deeper into a thought, an idea, or a concept – and that’s where these speciality, individual bloggers come in.

Keep it up, guys!  Boutin may not agree with it, but I’m still reading … and if you got this far, apparently you are too.

Since the 1980s, the term ‘outsourcing’ has become fixed in business jargon.  Outsourcing refers to the transference of duties or management to a third party, usually outside of the parent company’s country.  This is sometimes used synonymously with “off-shoring,” wherein a company opens another office in a foreign country to take advantage of a cheaper labor force or better tax situation.

I’m sure I’m not the only consumer who has routinely been at the end of a baffling and/or sometimes annoying phone call with companies who outsource.  I’m not saying that outsourcing is bad, but I think sometimes companies ignore the problems with outsourcing over the obvious advantages.

Advantages to Outsourcing

1. Your support desk or QA team can work around the clock.  You can have people working a typical 9-to-5 in your home country, and with an outsourced team in Asia, for example, they will start work at the end of your day and end at the beginning.  Thus, work continues twenty-four hours a day.
2. Outsourcing dramatically reduces cost.  Skilled labor in most countries where outsourcing occurs is a fraction of the cost of someone you might hire for your home office.  I recently spoke with a colleague whose job is being outsourced upon her departure from the company, and she said that the new person would be getting approximately USD 450 a month – a good salary in India – compared with her $50-60K per year.
3. Outsourcing can allow you to focus on the more time-sensitive responsibilities.  One of the main uses for outsourcing is using a lower-cost labor force to perform the day-to-day, repetitive duties that previously had taken your eye off of the more important tasks at hand.  This is why using outsourcing for customer support is so popular.

Disadvantages to Outsourcing

1. The language barrier can prove to be a huge obstacle.  I’m not saying that many of these outsourced folks aren’t fluent in English, because they are, but some outsourcing communities play down the other factors that are involved: strong accents and a lack of knowledge of American colloquialisms.  I recently placed a support call to a very popular CRM and had to repeat my problem three times.  The gentleman on the other end was very nice, but just couldn’t seem to ‘get’ what I was trying to say.  Or perhaps he did, but I couldn’t understand him when he spoke back to me.  Either way, this is not a good thing, and it’s happening more and more often.
2. Outsourcing means a loss of control.  You will have managers at your outsourced location, who will do their best to follow and enforce the rules included within the outsourcing contract, but be aware that you run the risk of losing the proper management techniques that you have employed at your headquarters.  Because of this, productivity and quality of service can suffer.
3. Communication becomes less cohesive.  The time difference means that duties may often take longer to do than if you had a full-time, in-house employee.  If the tasks being outsourced are HR- or website-related, you may find that it takes an extra day or more to get a simple task completed.  Similarly, if you have an urgent matter to attend to, calling the outsourced company in the middle of the day your time will get you nowhere, as it will be the middle of the night there.  There is also the matter of quality control, as it is much harder to explain a design concept, for example, in person than it is over the phone or via WebEx.

On a final note, one must also consider the social ramifications of offshore outsourcing.  In the 1980s, outsourcing was limited, for the most part, to manufacturing; that’s where the campaigns against cheap labor came in, especially in the case of children being used as workers.  Now, though, outsourcing has taken more of a high-tech route.  On the one hand, outsourcing creates jobs and opportunities in areas that otherwise might not have seen the economic growth that it has.  On the other, this does mean that well-educated, skilled American workers are finding it harder and harder to gain employment because so many technology jobs are being shipped overseas.  The Economic Policy Institute, a non-profit and (self-proclaimed) non-partisan organization, recently said that 18 percent of all jobs in California are susceptible to outsourcing.

One must also consider the current state of the world.  Before outsourcing to a specific country, do your research.  Ensure that the political climate is conducive to a safe, productive workplace.  The last thing you want is for communication to be completely cut off between your headquarters and your outsourced entity due to, say, a terrorist attack on the external country’s capital.  Don’t presume to think that this is a long shot; one major location for outsourcing is Pakistan, which has seen a steady increase in violence over the last year.

Is outsourcing right for you?  I can’t answer that.  I only ask that companies take a look at the big picture, instead of focusing solely on the allure of a cheaper workforce.